Tasmania

Pond's eighth album Tasmania has a theme running through it about the devastating effect climate change is wreaking in Australia. This eco-lament finds Nick Allbrook talking about the titular island. He sees it as a paradise with clean air in which he takes refuge.

I might, I might go shack up in TasmaniaBefore the ozone goesAnd paradise burns in AustraliaWho knows? Who knows?

Allbrook told Uncut magazine: "There's a lyric in their title track 'I might go shack up in Tasmania before the ozone goes' that sums up the air-headed ignorance of us, the 20-to-30-year-old middle-class Australians who have a sense of responsibility but also this fear and apathy, this confusion and difficulty balancing these things. Like, do you run away to Tasmania to try to get another 20 years of cool and green? Then that idea expands to everything, like national identity and love and relationships and friendships and music.

The whole thing was inspired by this time I got drunk with someone who worked for CSIRO, the Australian Science Research agency. He had a projected temperature map of Australia over the next 100 years and it just gets redder and redder from the top and Tasmania is just this island of blue in the corner. Tasmania's always been a pretty place to visit, but it's getting to the point where people are scrambling to live there to get a bit of freshness because temperatures in Australia are close to unlivable."